Recent warming of Arctic Water (AW)

Just a short post about a short article from Science which was published in January. Spielhagen et al (2011) counted assemblages of planktonic foraminifera from a 14C dated core taken from the West Coast of Svalbard, with a resolution of around 18 years, higher than previous works. In total the core was found to cover c.2000 years. Planktic foraminifers typically grow between 50-150m ocean depth and the 'bloom peak' is around August meaning these records are of summer ocean temperature. Estimates of temperature were calculated by a statistical comparison of assemblages found in the core to a modern dataset of foraminifera assemblages from areas with different environmental conditions. It's hoped that by using this Modern Analogue Technique (MAT), it's possible to match up two similar assemblages, and it's assumed that conditions which determine the two aren't going to be that much different. Clearly, the assumptions, and therefore possibility for error are pretty big, so results have to be pretty significant to be meaningful.

The results showed a large increase in temperature in the past c.150 years, which was unusual when compared to the past 2000 years, found to be similar to the observational records of the Arctic Atlantic Warm Layer (AAWL). This strongly suggests that Arctic Water (AW) inflow from the Atlantic is warming, which has the potential to significantly speed up sea ice melt.

Of course, this is based on only one core, so this article is more of a call for more research rather than necessarily conclusive findings. It will be interesting to see if the significance of these AW changes can be de-tangled from all the other influences of Arctic sea-ice levels.